This senior seminar is investigating post-1945 New York City, institutions
of film reception, the relationship of motion pictures to the New York atr
world, the neighborhoods of the city, and the historical context of the
post-1945 American society. Our exploration with the New York cityscape
within the field of American Studies includes Columbia University and movie theatres of
Manhattan's Upper West Side in the 1950s, avant-garde cinema and the
performing arts of Greenwich Village in
the 1960s, and the possible links between New York film culture and Don
DeLillo's Underworld, a novel seeking to construct
"hypertextual" connections between private lives and the public
history of the United States since 1945.